Sneak-Peek/World-Building: What You Need to Know About Magic (Patreon)

First off: Thank you for all the responses on the poll!

After chewing on what to share with the world-building stuff, this felt like a natural starting point. Then I started writing the "rules of magic" for Good Intentions in my head and figured it might be more fun if I wrote it as an in-world document from the witches we know best.

For what it's worth, you can consider Molly and Onyx reliable narrators here. Most of these rules and principles have been scattered throughout the books, but not laid out in one place--and I'm pretty sure I've included a few points here that haven't been directly addressed before.

Hope you like this! The story post should be up a little later today.

From: Onyx, Molly

To: Nguyen, Colleen; Bridger, Douglas

Subject: What You Need to Know About Magic

Dear Secret FBI Pals,

We’re working on your request for a guide for dealing with magic and thought we would send you the basic outline we have so far. Some of this doesn’t go into much more detail than what we have below, but ask whatever questions you’ve got. Formatting is a different issue. We don’t know what secret FBI training manuals look like, so we’ll leave that part to you.

If any of this is contrary to what Bridger knows, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. He learned on a different path from ours. That’s a whole issue unto itself.

1. Magic is learned through different Practices (by humans, anyway). A Practice is part philosophy and/or religion, part culture, and part approach and technique. What works for one Practice may not work for another, and that might be a matter of philosophy or values, or it might be a matter of mechanics. Don’t expect one size to fit all and don’t expect Practitioners to follow the same rules. Even within a Practice, you’ll find variations.

2. Call us Practitioners, call us sorcerers, or call us by something Practice-specific, but do not call anyone “wizard” unless you’re trolling them. “Magician” and “mage” are also problematic because of pop culture references.

3. Magical talent is rare, but it’s not commonly determined by bloodlines or heritage. Think of it like a talent for basketball or music or art, except it’s rarer and the learning curve is steeper if you don’t have the knack. From what we can tell, pretty much anyone can learn at least a little magic if they put in enough effort.

4. Magic is shy. The more witnesses you have present, the less powerful magic is, unless your witnesses are all touched by magic to begin with. Magic is still useful in a crowd if it can go undetected, but this is why you don’t see people throw fireballs in the street.

a. There’s no all-encompassing expectation of secrecy among Practitioners. Some of those books on the shelves in New Age stores are completely legitimate. Magic is a secret because of how it works, not because of conspiracy.

b. This is also why vampires are easier to deal with if you know they’re vampires. They lose a lot of their edge once the mystery is gone.

5. Magic pulls back on itself. This is a common understanding among many Practices. Working with magic makes you more prone to what might seem like coincidences or fate, leading you to more encounters with magic rather than fewer. There’s not much you can do to game this, and it’s not a constant, but it’s something to be aware of.

6. Magical power is shared over a given area. What constitutes an “area” seems inconsistent. Sometimes it’s a city, sometimes it’s a bigger region. What’s clear is the more Practitioners there are in an area, the less power there is to go around for all of them. There are ways Practitioners can group up and share better, but this only goes so far. In the end, this generally leads to more jealousy and competition than cooperation.

a. To illustrate: the lone sorcerer in Yuma, AZ might be a champ or a dabbler, but either way he’s got a lot more to work with than all the sorcerers fighting over real estate in San Francisco. (No, we don’t know if there are any sorcerers in Yuma.)

7. Magic is about the Practitioner, not about the tools. By and large, a Practitioner does not strictly need things like magic wands, crystals, powders, etc. They can help a lot, and you will find variations up and down the different Practices. But for the record, do not consider a Practitioner disarmed or powerless because they don’t have their tools. Some of us can get by just fine without them if need be.

8. The easiest defenses against magic for the non-magically talented: stay in public or crowded places, keep an iron nail in your pocket, sprinkle or pour salt on anything that might be affected by magic, and/or rinse it with water (weak, but it can help). We’ll go into these in depth later.

9. Magic has limits. Many of these limits come down to Practitioner beliefs and the strengths and weaknesses of their techniques. Some limits seem to be common across Practices, though.

a. Time-manipulating magic seems rare and extremely difficult. At best, magic can slow or speed up time in a small area by a few seconds, and only with a lot of power.

b. Predictive magic doesn’t really see the future. It usually boils down to drawing on patterns and external sources to make a guess, kind of like predicting the weather with science.

c. Every example of teleportation we’ve seen has involved non-human involvement of some sort. We could be wrong, but this doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing a human Practitioner can do on their own.

d. We have no reason to believe magic can resurrect the dead. Zombies are an option using a few different techniques and they’re all gross.

e. Just because a spell works doesn’t mean it can’t be overloaded or have any weak points. A spell that can deflect one bullet might not deflect fifty.

It’s probably best if this was kept confidential within your task force. Again, there’s no broad law of secrecy across Practices. We could publish all this in a book and probably get nothing more than some irritation from other Practitioners, but writing memos directly for the FBI is kind of a different context.

Let us know what questions you’ve got or where you want more detail and we’ll see what we can do.

--Molly and Onyx